Created a New Blog, Played More Basketball

So I jumped back in the saddle and played another full court game down on campus today. Some of the same guys were there. I wasn't great, but this time I made a few plays across the board--tough rebound, defense, shot in traffic, pass in traffic--that got some love from the other members of my team. Still couldn't hit the outside shot. Lifting weights first might have contributed to that, but it also seemed to calm me down a bit at the start. Have to figure it all out slowly. Don't think I can play more than a couple days a week at most. We'll see how much agony I'm in tonight.

Also created a new blog, Sand Dreaming of Stars, just to post my fiction and some of my poems. Becoming an official, paid, published writer is less a part of my dream than just getting my ideas out of my head and into the world. I still plan on submitting things, but I'm also going to put rejected or in progress material here under a Creative Commons 3.0 noncommercial license. If it ever gets to the point where somebody cares about who has first publishing rights to something I've already posted, I'll have made much more progress than I have to date.

Got a Rejection

What a crap day. I played full court basketball for the first time in a year today, didn't play well, got completely exhausted, hurt my leg a bit, and felt quite old.

I noticed that my right front tire is very low on air pressure when I got home (maybe a slow leak, don't know yet) and found that my portable air compressor had a dead battery. Hopefully I can get it recharged in time to pump up the tire to take the kids to school tomorrow.

My neighbors who had asked me to watch/feed their six pets on Friday then revealed that they needed me to be taking care of them Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Then, right as I was getting ready for bed, while doing something else on the computer, two new emails arrived, one of which was a rejection for my flash fiction story "The Cold Portions" from Flash Fiction.

You might recall that my first submission to them got a very positively worded rejection email.

This one was a little simpler and much less helpful. "Unfortunately, I'm going to pass on The Cold Portions."

I felt pretty proud of this story and I have to admit I'm surprised as well as disappointed at the rejection and the utter lack of interest it conveyed.

2010 sucks so far and it's not like 2009 had raised the bar particularly high.

Feeling Blue

Been sort of morose and uninspired lately. Ideas come but I can't seem to motivate myself to pursue them with much enthusiasm. Haven't even been reading as much in the last couple weeks.

I think it's a combination of:

• My Job Status, or Lack Thereof. I always get a little anxious when I haven't worked for a bit, but the last year or so the freelance scene has been so unreliable and inconsistent that it's beginning to wear on me. I had thought that my pseudo-career was fairly well insulated against the types of layoffs that have been plaguing people I know in the publishing industry, but that assumption isn't holding up very well at the moment.
• The Economy in General. Hearing depressing economic news week after week is, well, depressing.
• Politics. Ugh. Why is it that when Democrats are down they stay down for 3-4 years at least, while the Republicans just seem to bounce back within a couple years no matter what they were responsible for? Oh, right, it's because the Democrats can never get organized and the Republicans always conveniently forget how they triggered so many of the problems they complain about because they believe in principles, not empirical evidence.
  
• Getting Older. Gotta see the doctor about what may or may not be a prostate issue on Monday. Right wrist always hurts a bit, other parts just gradually breaking down.
• Writer's Block. Somehow it was easier for me to lose myself in reading and writing escapist fiction when the world around me seemed generally okay but just less fulfilling and more brain dead than I wished it would be. The world still seems mostly brain dead, but I have more worries.

Hopefully this is just a phase that I will be able to transition from into something better.

Star Trek Computers

On Star Trek, especially Next Generation, whenever anybody has any serious questions to work out on the ship computers, they give verbal commands and the computer talks back to them.

This would logically lead to a situation akin to sitting on a bus or in a store full of people talking on their cell phones--stray bits and pieces of conversation colliding to create a noisy, discordant background noise.

But when you enter the bridge or the engineering room, you don't hear a dozen muffled conversations, just the hum of machinery. So what the hell are people working on?